Prolexic Reviews

The main use case for DDoS protection is to mitigate risks, and there are multiple ways Akamai provides DDoS protection; one is application-based DDoS protection and the other is volumetric DDoS protection, which is a layer two DDoS.

Akamai's most valuable features include being industry recognized and PCI compliant, which is really great; their cloud is PCI compliant, and having a vendor that is PCI certified is crucial for organizations focused on PCI compliance.

We utilize the real-time monitoring of the solution. Real-time monitoring helps us identify network vulnerabilities by allowing us to see a spike in traffic and understand the traffic levels compared to this time last month or last week. If we notice a sudden increase, we investigate further to determine if it indicates a DDoS attack or a card testing situation.

In terms of threat detection capabilities, they are very good because Akamai has a SOC service that we have tapped into for active threat detection and threat hunting, and they monitor everything carefully 24/7.

Scrubbing is done by Akamai as a backend service, and we utilize their SOC, which is a service that you pay additional fees for, allowing us to have our queries prioritized.

Prolexic features help maintain business continuity during high-volume attacks by having built-in threat detection capabilities in its bot detection and other functionalities, as attacks usually occur through intelligent bots trying to infiltrate the system.

For the DDoS protection, I don't see any areas for improvement because they are pretty solid there, though in bot management, there are times when attackers find ways to bypass Akamai, which is a continuously evolving challenge.

For the DDoS part, I have dealt with Akamai solutions for now over a year.

Their support is quite available, and our account manager is always accessible, which is great, especially as we are currently rolling out Akamai as our WAF, DDoS, and Bot Management solution that inspects traffic.

Positive

Before choosing Akamai, we evaluated other options such as Barracuda and AWS Firewalls and WAFs, but we are not changing the AWS stuff due to dependencies, so we are replacing Barracuda with Akamai largely for its PCI compliance and secure bot management.

The main differences between Barracuda and Akamai's DDoS solution are that Akamai is far more capable in terms of AI detection and has smart detection for advanced detection compared to AWS for bot management.

We have a couple of products, including DDoS protection, WAF, and Bot Manager.

There are two ways Akamai does DDoS protection; one is through their product that we already have as an add-on license, while Prolexic is used if you want to utilize DDoS protection without the WAF.

Compared to its competitors, the pricing or licensing of the product is super expensive, but I consider it value for money since they are niche in the market regarding their bot capacities.

On a scale of 1-10, I rate this solution an 8.

Our company uses the solution to provide customized infrastructure and cloud services to our customers. We currently have five to ten customers using the solution. 

Our model is to continue to move toward software as a service. We already offer infrastructure and platforms as a service. 

The solution does not have hardware or maintenance requirements and is very easy to scale. 

The solution needs additional product options for small and medium enterprises. 

Pricing should be more transparent and visible on the website. Currently, we need to request pricing through an email back-and-forth and that takes time. 

I have been using the solution for one year. 

The solution is stable and is upgraded all the time to prevent bots and attacks. 

The solution is scalable. It takes a simple request to add features or upscale. 

Responses could be quicker so I rate support a six out of ten. 

Neutral

The setup is straightforward. 

We implement the solution for our customers. 

The pricing is a pay-as-you-go model that is charged by the hour. Data centers can be very expensive, so removing the hassle of hardware or maintenance and charging only for use is an effective model. 

I rate pricing a seven out of ten. 

Our company provides the solution or Cloudflare to our customers based on their environment.

The solution is a good fit for customers who need customized options or test products.

Cloudflare is a good fit for small to large enterprise environments because various products are available. 

I rate the solution a seven out of ten. 

Always-on DDOS protection/mitigation. 

We suffered from DDOS attacks and needed a fast mitigation solution. We selected Prolexic routed through GRE tunnels to two different scrubbing centers. This was possible since we own our IPv4 blocks and have our own AS number from RIPE.

We have suffered from DDOS attacks but that has stopped since we implemented this solution. The only downtime we have now is from our own applications/releases.

The support from Akamai is great, and they provide excellent information and mitigation services. The service is very expensive but you get what you pay for. We have not had any issues since we implemented this. They call and say, "You are under attack," and we do not notice.

The web portal for checking status and traffic needs improvements. For example, it's not possible to change the time zone, so all graphs display the wrong time.

There are maintenance on scrubbing centers now and then, but we have never had any traffic outage. E-mail alerts always come in advance and so far no issues.

This was our first provider. We did not have time to to evaluate competitors since we was under attack. 

After the 3 year period, we canceled the expensive contract with Akamai and tested F5 Silverline. Since we use F5 Load Balancers and ASM we thought it would be a good idea to utilize the communication between our in-house ASM and Silverline cloud. However, we could not get a clear picture for the pricing and what services we could get. We had to go through re-sellers in 2 extra layers. We got tired about getting different prices about unclear services and offers so we went back to Akamai. We managed to get the pricing down by almost 50%. We could deal directly with Akamai and no confused re-sellers was involved. 

I rate it eight out of 10. It would get a nine if the web portal was better and 10 if the price was lower. We have been using it for three years. We canceled the contract recently and are looking into using another vendor to reduce the price by two-thirds. 

Prolexic PLXRoute allows businesses to have on-demand DDoS protection. There is no need to call Prolexic SOC requesting DDoS mitigation to be deactivated because of legitimate traffic being scrubbed.

PLXRoute – 8: The PLXRoute

• Gives businesses control of their traffic path, minimizing the amount of interaction businesses must have with Prolexic Technical Team.
• Once initially configured and operational, zero configuration is needed for DDoS mitigation and content delivery.
• DDoS NetOps can be automated.

PLXProxy – 6

• Geared towards businesses of all sizes with very little technical staff.
• Easily configured and manage by staff with knowledge of web hosting

With Prolexic PLXRoute solution, we were able to transition from a Prolexic managed DDoS mitigation infrastructure to a business managed solution. At first, we were using Prolexic PLXProxy solution during times of high traffic. We would experience latency that was unacceptable for adequately servicing our customers on our real-time betting platform. With Prolexic PLXRoute we can bypass Prolexic scrubbing centers on demand.

The reports need to be improved.

PLXRoute – 8: The PLXRoute

• Requires good technical staff to configure, manage and monitor the PLXRoute infrastructure.
• PLXRoute configuration on the business side can be configured by Prolexic Technical Team at a cost.
• Poor reporting. The reports provided doesn’t give detailed information about DDoS mitigations, bandwidth utilization, etc.
• Can be difficult to manage if technical personnel are not available on staff.

PLXProxy – 6

• Any changes to service offerings (website URL, web security) will require Prolexic to make change to their Proxy servers
• Poor reporting. The reports provided don’t give detailed information about DDoS mitigations, bandwidth utilization, etc.
• Security certificates must be shared with Prolexic to be configured on their proxy servers.

I had used Prolexic Proxy Solution (PLXProxy) for a period of about eight years and Prolexic Routed On-Demand (PLXRoute) for about three years.

We haven’t had stability problems. PLXRoute and PLXProxy are very stable products.

Prolexic technical support is second to none. If you are a networking professional with a solid skills set, the technical team at Prolexic will be glad to work with you so that knowledge can be exchanged. They will also build a close technical relationship with you, giving you ideas and solutions for your datacenter(s).

We didn’t have a previous solution.

The initial setup was very straightforward. Once negotiations about licensing and contact are complete, you will receive detailed documentation. If you are a highly skilled networking professional but are lacking confidence in performing the necessary configuration, Prolexic technical staff will extend their support to assist in configuring your infrastructure.

Prolexic has been our choice from day one.

Any business looking to implement any of the solutions that Prolexic offers will need to exercise due diligence. Working with Prolexic can become costly. Prolexic licensing and contracts take into account bandwidth, level of technical support required, eBDP Peers (for PLXRoute), and number of websites (for PLXProxy). If a business doesn't understand what they are offering and what is required to protect it, then they may over or under subscribe to Prolexic services.

Since they're basically a DDoS protection service, dropping the initial necessary investment for the on-premises DDoS detection and mitigation is the most valuable feature of this solution.

They've scrubbed DDoS traffic that was blasting us offline, thus allowing legitimate traffic through and letting our service return online.

I don't have any particular suggestions here, it does what it's supposed to do. It's expensive, though.

Not sure for how long the company has used it, I have used it for about a year but it existed for a few years before that.

There were no stability issues.

The technical support team is great! They have dedicated SOC teams ready in minutes for emergencies.

We were not using any other solution. Currently, we are researching about additional on-prem solutions.

The initial setup requires networking knowledge, as GRE tunnels and BGP sessions must be set up, along with routing decisions. In addition, the TCP MSS need to be adjusted for allowing the GRE tunnel overhead. For example, the setting of the TCP MSS higher than 1500, such as to 1600, so as to allow for the GRE header overhead.

Consider how this solution fits into a comprehensive DDsS defense strategy, don't just outsource responsibility to them. Walk, don't fall in.

If internal procedures suck and the emergency responders fall over each other in detection/verification during an incident, Prolexic can only help so much. Have a way to move towards the automated signaling mechanisms that invoke DDoS mitigation route on to their network faster than a human can.